MAY 17, 1999:
It has been a bloody, telling season, this final spring of the century and millennium.
Each headline forces the surrender of another illusion. We don't know where to turn,
so we turn in circles, as though in a macabre waltz. The record of realizations reads
like a casualty list -- which, in fact, it is.

Item: On March 30, President Clinton told Dan Rather we "should not be surprised
that what has happened on the ground has happened. It was always obvious it was going
to happen." Oh? Then why were no preparations made for the catastrophe of the
uprooted Albanians? At almost the same moment, NATO spokesman Jamie Shea was exposing
Clinton's shameless lie: "Even we have been shocked by the sheer enormity of
what is going on in Kosovo at the moment." [All facts in quotes are from The
New York Times.]

Item: Our high-tech attack machines don't work well against the small army of
a very poor country ... if it happens to be raining. Weather described as "foul"
has been used to excuse the fact that in one month of massive bombing we could confirm
the destruction of only 30 Yugoslav tanks. On April 28, General Clark, the
American NATO commander, admitted: "If you actually added up what's there on
any given day, you might actually find that Milosevic has strengthened his forces."
And the weather blamed for this failure? Scan the reports and you read only of "overcast
skies," "clouds," "fog and rain" -- normal spring weather
for most of the northern hemisphere.

But our "smart bombs" often do no better in good weather. April 6, after
a day of clear weather: "NATO experts reviewing photos of Monday's targets found
they were unable to confirm the destruction of a single tank or military vehicle."
Flash forward to May 7: While admitting that the bombing has "failed to stop
Serbian forces ... from driving most of the 1.8 million Albanians ... out of their
homes," NATO suddenly claims to have destroyed "200 tanks and other armored
vehicles, artillery pieces and trucks" -- though no proof was offered. "We
are grinding down their morale," said a General Jertz, while the same report
contained this statement: "Senior NATO and American intelligence officials have
said they had seen evidence that Serbian army morale had actually risen."

Item: On April 8 we read that "tens of thousands of Kosovo refugees waiting
to cross the border here vanished in the middle of the night .... No one knows what
happened to them." Eighty thousand people! And they remained invisible to us
until they "reappeared" (so the report read) nine days later. Clearly
our intelligence and surveillance techniques are not functioning as advertised.

Item: Three inexperienced American soldiers disobeyed or forgot their orders (or
got lost); they were surrounded, held captive for a month, released; their commanders
and the media have been calling them "heroes," so impoverished has our
idea of heroism become.

illustration by Jason Stout

Item, March 31: "The Joint Chiefs of Staff and NATO generals recognized that
bombing alone had never [my italics] successfully driven out a dug-in land
army, but some senior officials in the Administration believed that Mr. Milosevic
would fold under withering airstrikes." Well, we have proved ourselves incapable
of "withering" airstrikes. And those "senior administration officials"
now turn out to have been President Clinton, Secretary of State Albright, and Secretary
of Defense Cohen -- who got into Kosovo against the strong advice of their own military
and intelligence services. In fact, it turns out that on January 19, when Secretary
of State Madeleine Albright presented her bombing plan, the president wasn't even
at the meeting. "His lawyers were starting their arguments on the Senate floor
against his removal from office," and he was working on his State of the Union
address, which he would deliver that night.

So: Clinton lies about Monica Lewinsky; the nation spends a year preoccupied with
his lies; in that year China steals precious atomic secrets, American foreign policy
falls apart all over the globe, and we end by blundering into a war that is causing
untold suffering to hundreds of thousands in Kosovo and Yugoslavia while demonstrating
nothing but the powerlessness of our power -- and, in the process, ruining the reputation
of NATO, destabilizing Albania, Macedonia, and possibly Greece, alienating Russia
(with Yeltsin actually threatening a world war -- something that our media tried to
underplay in every way) and losing all hope of defusing Russia's remaining nukes.
Recall that we promised Russia that NATO would be used only in defense; but NATO
is attacking a country very close to the Russian border. Recent joint statements
with Russia are meant to patch this up, but read the full reports and you see that
no agreements have been reached. And then we bombed the Chinese embassy because the
CIA's map was two years out of date.

Do the words "criminal negligence" ring a bell? Yet the Clinton administration
will be our leadership for another year and eight months.

Item, April 17: This war "was launched, in President Clinton's words, 'to
protect thousands of innocent people in Kosovo from a mounting military offensive.'"
But as of April 28 the figures were these: 700,000 Kosovars were refugees in Albania
and Macedonia, while another 820,000 were homeless and hungry in their own country
-- and no one knows how many have been massacred. I know of no other instance in American
history in which our endeavor has failed so spectacularly, so quickly, so helplessly.

And how has this happened? In a television interview General Clark, the American
commander of NATO, was asked if what was happening in Kosovo was a war. He said,
"'War' is a legal term." He called Kovoso an "operation."

Well, "war" is a legal term, as used in the Constitution of the
United States: Article 1, Section 8, states unequivocally that Congress has the power
to declare war. Congress, and only Congress. The president's foreign policy powers
are defined in Article 2, Section 2: "He shall have Power, by and with the Advice
and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two-thirds of the Senate present
concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate,
shall appoint Ambassadors, and other public Ministers and Consuls ...." And
that's all. The president does not have the power or the right to commit troops to
a foreign war on his (or her) own.

For most of the 20th century -- in Vietnam, for instance -- we've chosen to ignore
our Constitution.This has been a deliberate, conscious, repeated choice, made by
Republicans as well as Democrats, liberals as well as conservatives. We have willingly
thrown away our birthright as citizens, and today a million and a half Kosovars are
paying the price.

I pass on the words of a 14-year-old student, Kyra Scemama. Her teacher, Karen
Grant, asked what was meant by Elie Wiesel's phrase, "in a world without god
and without man." Kyra wrote:

"In a world of men who have tied themselves so tightly to the arm of an
almighty thing and have lived their lives only for God, it becomes impossible to
exist once your Everything leaves you to the lions. The cannibal lions who snarl
with the sanctions of themselves. God died in their souls. A God who was their love
and their mercy, their faith and all that made them men. But the lions have left
us with little for they have buried us all in their bellies, and the growling in
their stomachs mirrors the screams of our hearts as we pack up the bread crumbs of
another man's dream."

Krya's paragraph is more poem than prose, its literal sense suggestive, not expository.
But the tense music of her words, and their tortured and tortuous implications, are
the true music of the end of the "American century" and the Western millennium.
We who have willingly kissed off our constitutional birthright know more than we
will ever admit about "the cannibal lions who snarl with the sanction of themselves."
We have mistaken ambition for desire, greed for freedom, security for peace. We have
elected the lesser of two evils over and over, and have reaped evil in return. In
Kyra's terms, our love and our mercy and our faith was all that made us human beings,
and we have sacrificed them to the lions. And now America is a lost and wounded lion,
afraid of itself, afraid of everyone else, trapped within its inventions, with a
soaring stock market, one and a half million refugees, and one more unconstitutional
war. We have so little faith in our own policies that we are afraid to risk a single
American life, while we kill others. The "American century" is ending in
humiliation, cowardice, and incompetence.

I can't ask Kyra's generation to forgive us, but I pray they learn to understand
us, root out our mistakes, find mercy and love and faith on their own terms, and
leave us behind.

We cannot expect respect for the history we've created, and we have no right to
ask for mercy from the people to whom we've bequeathed such a world. What will be
said of us, when the Kosovo war is ended, will be like what the Roman historian Tacitus
wrote of his Empire's occupation of Britain: "They make a devastation and call
it peace."